The term unused capacity implies the following:
Every company has resources and assets it’s not using, but could be using, to wildly increase their growth.
SaaS products ideally help leverage that unused capacity.
Uber → how cars spend 99% of their time in a driveway not being used
AirBnB→ entire floors of houses left largely unoccupied
Heck, even skyscrapers → all the space in the sky they can utilize
For B2B SaaS, it’s usually valuable data customers are sitting on.
A weapons arsenal they're not using. Gold in their back pocket.
And this article is about how to communicate the unused capacity your SaaS product leverages.
So before this gets too theoretical, let’s illustrate the concept with practical SaaS examples:
Otter.ai
Old headline: doesn’t imply that recorded conversations are assets I can get more mileage out of.
New headline: frames “manually transcribing my meetings” as a mistake. An opportunity to turn a cumbersome process into an opportunity for actionable insights.
The takeaway: Otter lets me leverage data I previously couldn't, which is highly valuable meeting notes buried in hours of audio recordings I wouldn’t otherwise comb through.
Gong
Gong’s positioning is brilliant (and part of the reason they did $60M in revenue in 2020 and have accumulated over $330M in funding).
They position themselves as tapping into a specific unused capacity: your sales calls.
Their category's term “Revenue Intelligence” boldly plants their flag:
"The answer to million-dollar questions are locked inside your sales calls. We make it really easy and fast to unlock those answers (rather than the limited, distorted data in CRMs)."
Plus, the personality in their copy supports their brand:
Note: Slapping the word "intelligence" on your software is not what I’m suggesting you do.
Blix
The unused capacity Blix targets is clear:
"Many retailers are spending thousands, if not millions, on getting customers through their doors, but virtually $0 learning why these customers leave without purchasing a product."
This new headline is about unlocking the treasure chest that is conversion data.
And the best part is, they already have the treasure chest. The value Blix brings is the key to open it up.
Baremetrics:
An excellent example of how to leverage underutilized information (and communicating it well in their copy):
“This bad thing is happening to your business right now, what are you doing about it?”
(copywriting example) User Onboarding Emails
An example from my own experience:
How SaaS companies miss opportunities to SELL in their copy.
When users sign up for your free trial, they’re exposing a moment of high intent.
Momentum.
The user is saying:
"I'm interested in your software enough to try it out. How does it work and how does it solve my problem better than all the other solutions I could choose?"
And sadly, here's more-or-less how 9 out of 10 companies respond:
“Thanks for signing up! Our product is so cool :) Wanna read this 50-page e-book?”
Huge opportunity, totally missed.
Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars acquiring signups, then once they sign up, send them one email?
This is one of many examples of unused capacity.
How you can apply this information in the next 5 minutes:
Jot down a quick list of every marketing asset you already have that you’re under-utilizing (user onboarding emails, old blog posts you could update & re-distribute, core website pages that aren’t selling at all, etc.) and optimize them.
Get as much mileage out of them as possible.
Find your unused capacity and watch the results.